“I saw you through the window,” Hannah calls out. “I know you’re in there.”

Claire swings the door open. She’s wearing rubber gloves on her hands, and the stink of cleaning products emanates from the door.

The look she gives Hannah is far from friendly.

“Is Logan here?” Hannah says.

“No, he had some friends come into town and they went hiking.”

“Do you know where they went?”

Claire shakes her head. Her put-out expression sends the clear message that she’d like for Hannah to leave so she can get back to whatever she was doing.

“You and Logan weren’t really old friends, were you?” Hannah says. “You just saw a cute guy in the newspaper and wanted to meet him, didn’t you?”

Claire stares at her with ice-cold eyes, and then her face finally breaks into a smile. “You got me,” she says. “It doesn’t matter now though. Logan and I broke up.”

“You broke up?”

The corner of Claire’s mouth curves up, as if she’s holding back a grin.

“I’m just picking up the last of my things,” Claire says. “Then I’m out of here. As soon as he gets back from his hike, he’s all yours if you want him.”

Hannah pulls her car onto Highway 50 and heads back toward the newspaper. At a stoplight, she dials Logan’s number with her phone, but the call goes straight to voicemail. Her limbs buzz with a mixture of excitement and nervousness. Then she thinks about the whole encounter with Claire, how weird it was.

First of all, if Claire had been collecting her belongings, why was she cleaning Logan’s house? That seemed like a generous thing to do in the aftermath of a breakup, and Claire didn’t strike her as the kind of girl who would be that altruistic. It seemed more like she was scrubbing away any trace of her presence in Logan’s house.

More important, given what Logan told her that morning, Hannah can’t believe friends from out of town came to go hiking with him. Logan’s been hiding from anyone who knows him. There’s no way friends just showed up from out of town and he took them hiking.

Logan had said he’d hidden a cache of diamonds at Lake Aloha. If “friends” had come from out of town, then that’s where they’d gone. And not for some recreational hike.

Hannah slams on the brakes and whips her car in a tight U-turn. She speeds out of the city toward the trailhead where she first met Logan.

CHAPTER 22